Idaho Set to Declare "Null and Void" Obama's Health Care Law

After leading the nation last year in passing a law to sue the federal government over the health care overhaul, Idaho’s Republican-dominated Legislature now plans to use an obscure 18th century doctrine to declare President Barack Obama’s signature bill null and void.

Lawmakers in six other states — Maine, Montana, Oregon, Nebraska, Texas and Wyoming — are also mulling “nullification” bills, which contend states, not the U.S. Supreme Court, are the ultimate arbiter of when Congress and the president run amok.

It’s a concept that’s won favor among many tea party adherents who believe Washington, D.C., is out of control.

Though a 1958 U.S. Supreme Court decision reaffirmed that federal laws “shall be the supreme law of the land,” Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter is promoting the idea, too. In his January 10 State of the State speech, he told Idaho residents “we are actively exploring all our options — including nullification.”

Sen. Monty Pearce, an Idaho GOP lawmaker who plans to introduce a nullification bill early next week, wanted to be the first one to give Otter a recently published book on the subject, “Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century.”

But Otter beat him to the punch.

“I took that copy and tried to give it to the governor,” he said, pointing to a copy on his desk. “He already had a copy.”

Sick of just passing largely symbolic resolutions decrying federal encroachment on states’ rights, proponents like Pearce say their bills will ratchet up the pressure on the feds: This isn’t just some piece of paper to wave about; if it passes — and there’s plenty in Idaho to suggest it will — this would become the law of the state, Pearce says.

It’s been tried before, a long time ago.

Back in 1799, Thomas Jefferson wrote in his “Kentucky Resolution,” a response to federal laws passed amid an undeclared naval war against France, that “nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts… is the rightful remedy.”

Three decades later, South Carolina Sen. John Calhoun pushed nullification of federal tariffs that many in the South deemed discriminatory toward agricultural slave states. President Andrew Jackson readied the military, before a compromise defused the situation.